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Saturday, January 7, 2012

"Divide and rule"? Diane Abbott was right

in a society steeped in white supremacy white racists incite racism and stereotypes(an example is the racist BBC show Top Gear) is called free speech and when people of colour (POC) objects to being dehumanzed and stereotyped they are called, sensitive, politically correct, and accused of playing the race card. but when a POC like Dianne Abbot exercise the same freedoms and tell the truth about white supremacy. she is called a racist and is asked to resign and apologize.

Racism, as the British National Party and its neo-fascist street
imitators have been arguing for years, cuts both ways. On 4 January, a
black British woman MP hammered out a comment on Twitter which could,
taken entirely out of context, be interpreted as a a generalisation
about white people. Diane Abbott MP is now Britain's best-known racist
-- in a week when the nation's top story has been the prosecution of the
murder of a black teenager by a gang of white youths and the subsequent
"institutional racism" that was unearthed in the handling of the case
by the Metropolitan police.
But hang on, what was it that Abbott
actually said? Let's have a little look at the generalisation over which
the Hackney MP got a public dressing-down from her own party. Abbott
said that "white people" like to play the game of "divide and rule".
That's rude, isn't it? Clearly she thinks that ordinary white people
like me spend the waking hours between tooth-brushing and the office
dividing and ruling. It couldn't possibly be a comment on the structural
imposition of power along lines of race and class, particularly not
from a veteran anti-racist campaigner, and especially not in a week
where institutional racism is in the news. That would just be silly.
Dorian Lynskey's comments on the matter
are worth quoting at length. He points out that Abbott, who has a track
record of saying the right thing in just the wrong way -- "she should
have said 'white people in power' or 'certain white people'" -- was
essentially on the money.

The British right has
always been allergic to any structural understanding of racial politics,
and all week, the commentariat has been coming out in hives. A day
before Abbottgate, a Telegraphleader
wrung its hands over the profound impact of the Lawrence trial on
racial awareness in British public life, complaining that "people" have
"found themselves denounced for harmless, if inappropriate, remarks".
Elsewhere, former Prospect editor David Goodhart wrote that:

If
the Stephen Lawrence case may help to diminish a black grievance
culture, it is likely to increase a white working class one . . . this
is part of a broader story of how parts of white working class London,
especially in the east and the south, felt that they had to accommodate
the changes required by post-war immigration...and then had to endure
lectures about racism from middle class liberals whose lives had not
been changed at all.

The argument that the "white
working class" has had anti-racist politics forced on it by "middle
class liberals" is an insult to those white working-class people who
have spent years, sometimes lifetimes, fighting racism in their
communities. In Barking and Dagenham in 2010, thousands of the borough's
residents mobilised to stop the British National Party gaining a
foothold in Westminster. Goodhart's lazy generalisations play right into
the language of the modern far-right: that anti-racism is itself
racist, and that any gains for black people must produce equal and
opposite losses for white people, in a world in which privilege and
prejudice can never be fought, only redistributed.
There's a term for that tactic. The term is "divide and rule".
It's
a tactic, as Abbott herself put it, "as old as colonialism" - and it's
also a tactic as modern as Twitter. When those with an ideological or
personal stake in defending the interests of privilege feel themselves
under threat, their first line of defence is often to persuade the
underprivileged that it is they who are under attack.
Rick Perry
and Mitt Romney defend tax-breaks for the super-rich by telling
blue-collar Americans that Democrats and union workers want to cut their
paycheques: divide and rule. David Cameron denounces industrial action
by encouraging low-paid private sector workers to complain that the
pensions public sector workers are striking to protect are higher than
theirs: divide and rule. David Willetts tells unemployed men that it's
all these selfish women in the workplace who have taken their jobs:
divide and rule. Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne, not to mention Ian Duncan
Smith, defend the dismantling of the welfare state by persuading the
working class that those in receipt of housing benefit are scroungers
scamming the system. Divide, dismiss -- and rule.
Everywhere, the
right fights public awareness of structural injustice by re-phrasing it
as a personal attack by one vulnerable demographic on another.
Structural injustice itself cannot be wedged into the story of
neoliberalism, which reduces everything to a cloying moral syrup of
personal responsibility lectures -- except where the banking sector is
involved, of course.
What's missing from the story -- what's
always missing -- is power. Defenders of privilege and hierarchy will do
anything at all to distract attention from power, and to re-phrase
attacks on power as attacks on the powerless. The chorus of faux-outrage
over Abbott's tweet isn't just cynical; in a week when structural
racism is in the news, it's a classic game of divide and rule.